Steve Kemery Wins Speed STSS Speed Showcase 50 at Port Royal Speedway

Steve Kemery won the prestigious Short Track Super Series Speed Showcase 50 at Port Royal with a green to checkered run into victory lane for the $4,000 payday taking the win over a 60 plus field of 602 crate competitors.

Kemery started on the outside pole and was able to take the lead on lap 1 over from pole setter Sean Metz.  After four restarts in the first two laps; Steve emerged with the led and last year’s champion Brian Krummel was right behind him in second place.  On lap 15 Kemery was able to maintain his lead on the 5^th and final restart holding Brian Krummel in 2^nd place.  The final 35 laps went green and Krummel made several strong moves for the lead but Kemery fended off each one and negotiated lapped traffic without exception to drive into the Speed Showcase 50 victory lane.     

On paper it may look like a snoozer with Kemery leading all 50 laps; but when you throw last year’s defending champion running on his back bumper for all 50 laps it was by no means a runaway victory.

Steve adds his $4,000 Speed Showcase 50 win to a list of some pretty prestigious race wins including the inaugural Danny Serrano Memorial and the Doug Hoffman Memorial.

Steve has been building momentum all season long with two early season Sunshine Series wins in Florida and six wins at this at Bridgeport.  He came into the Speed Showcase off of a strong 2nd place finish on Friday and a win on Saturday last weekend.

Steve reflected “Thursday the car was extremely tight from the apex of the corner to exit.  I knew we had to change it because we were just scrubbing too much exit speed.  We tried making smaller changes during the three practice sessions on Thursday which helped a little but just weren’t the end results we needed.  I knew we needed some shock help so I called Timmy Buckwalter.  He was not at Port Royal since he was racing at Linda’s for the National Open.  I spoke with Timmy on Friday morning 3 or 4 different times going over what we should try to switch around with the shocks and suspension.  I came to a decision on the phone with Timmy and we made the shock changes to see how it felt during Friday practice. After the changes we still didn’t time well during the warmups but the car felt so much better than it did on Thursday. On Thursday and during Friday’s warmups the track was very heavy and we planned on the track slicking off by our heat race like it normally does.”

Steve continued “We didn’t have the best pill pull by any means for the heat race; but we were lucky enough to be in a later heat and the track would be very wide.  We were able to go from 8th to battling for the lead all in the first lap.  That was the moment I knew we hit the setup correctly.  In my opinion the feature all came down to pill draw.  I have Hannah Kormann to thank for my front row pill draw in the feature.  She has been on a hot streak recently with her pulls for her father Eric Korrman and the first time she drew for me a few weeks ago at the Danny Serrano Memorial she drew the pole so she was the logical choice.  I am not allowed to do redraws anymore since I am absolutely horrible.  No doubt in my mind that if Krummel or Toth started ahead of us it would have been very tough to get around them.  The three of us all had very similar speed Friday and Saturday night and we all were running the same line so passing either one of them would have been diffacult.”

“During the cautions on laps 1, 2, and 4; I made it a point to take the outside line on the restarts knowing that Brian was still in 3rd at the time.  I wanted him behind Metz since I was able to put a couple car lengths on Metz each restart.  I didn’t want Brian on my back bumper going into turn 1 knowing he could rotate the bottom really well or even throw a slider.  On the lap 4 restart; Brain was able to get by Sean on the front stretch and showed his nose to me going into turn 1.  At that point I knew right away that I was going to have to run a perfect race, hit my marks, and be extremely aggressive in lap traffic to hold off Brian for 50 laps.  I also knew I couldn’t leave the top groove after watching the mod race on Thursday.  Godown left the top in 1&2 while in lap traffic on Thursday and that probably cost him the race.  I knew I couldn’t make that mistake.  Bridgeport and Port Royal are not similar.  But I will say running Bridgeport weekly helps you have to understand how to keep momentum while running different lines and that certainly helped with Port Royal this weekend.  Also when we got into extremely heavy lap traffic; knowing how to split lap cars while throwing a slider with dirty air on the car was also a huge move that I have learned at Bridgeport and it was a mighty handy move in the feature today. You could really feel a difference in the car when you are in lap traffic because there was no air on the front of the car.”

In victory lane Steve commented “I knew Brian would be good starting from 3^rd and it would only be a matter of time before the track slicked off which it did around lap 13/14 after that we could move around on the track and try different lines.  Brian ran me clean and we never touched.  I found a strip of rubber in the middle of turn 3 & 4 and ran the last12 or 13 laps there and never saw Brian.  I was making some hell of a moves through lapped traffic.  I was going to checker or wrecker it.  On Thursday I thought Brian would run away with this race but we found speed on Friday and this has been an amazing win.”